[Publisher’s Note: After the defeats suffered by the Republican Party in the General Election, we have reached out to some California leaders to ask them to reflect on this question, "What must the GOP do to once again be the majority party?" We are pleased to bring you this column from one of our own FR correspondents, Dan Schnur – Flash]
After last Tuesday’s elections, there are twenty-one Republican governors in the country. Because of constitutional restrictions, only twenty of them are thinking about running for president in 2012. But it’s always better to be a mile outside of hell heading out, and as the GOP looks to rebuild itself, as it did after the 1976 and 1992 elections, the political, policy and intellectual firepower for that effort will come from the states.
The Republican leadership on Capitol Hill seems resigned to fighting a series of rear-guard actions to watch for likely Democratic overreaches. John Boehner is one of the best political minds in the party. Mitch McConnell is one of the ablest legislative tacticians in either party. Both may serve well as leaders of the opposition. But neither represents either a new or renewed Republican Party. Their most important contribution will be holding the fort until the next generation of leadership emerges. While there are smart young thinkers within the GOP ranks in Congress – future stars like Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, Mike Pence of Indiana, and Kevin McCarthy and Devin Nunes from California – look for the next significant wave of energy to come from the party’s governors.
There is no shortage of potential candidates in this group: from the innovative (Mitch Daniels of Indiana) to the iconoclast (Mark Sanford of South Carolina), from the moderate (Charlie Crist of Florida) to the conservative (Jon Huntsman of Utah), from the familiar (Haley Barbour of Mississippi, Rick Perry of Texas) to the new faces (Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Bobby Jindahl of Louisiana). And of course, Sarah Palin, whether as a governor, Senator or talk show host, is poised to make a big imprint on the race if she chooses. Add to that the survivors of the class of 2008: Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, and perhaps Rudy Giuliani, and some not-so-recent alumni like Newt Gingrich and Jeb Bush (although that option might be better off a few more years down the road). So there are plenty of options to fill the dais at the Lincoln Day Dinner in Des Moines next year.
The bigger challenge is not with personalities but with public policy, most notably an economic debate within the party that will need to be resolved. Proponents of the Reagan economic agenda have always correctly made the case that reducing the tax burden benefited all classes of voters. But the most direct impact is undeniably on the most successful taxpayers, including the soccer parents who had begun shifting their party allegiances from Republican to Democratic over the past several election cycles. The ongoing Republican outreach to blue-collar, socially conservative voters has created the need for an economic message that speaks to the working class. Even given the continued resonance of tax cuts, the GOP agenda has been less effective in a recessionary climate when economically precarious voters are less aspirational than insecure.
The Republican Party’s biggest challenge is adjusting an economic message to a new group of necessary swing voters. Pawlenty calls them “Sam’s Club Republicans”. He and other members of the party’s next generation of leadership have begun the conversation of how to develop a pocketbook agenda that reaches the same voters who respond to the GOP on cultural and social matters. The most important debate within the Republican Party over the next few years will not be along moderate vs. conservative lines, or even divisions social vs. economic conservative. Rather, the real contest will be between economic traditionalists such as Romney and McConnell and Boehner on one hand and an emerging brand of economic populists such as Pawlenty, Jindahl and Huckabee on the other. But consider the parameters of this debate. After an election in which the centerpiece of the Democratic candidate’s economic agenda was a promised tax cut for ninety-five percent of the voters, a pending discussion of whether Reaganomics should be updated or otherwise adjusted should be a positive one for Republicans.
While not as evident at this moment, a parallel intramural problem exists for Democrats as well. Some of the new President’s more economically successful voters may not be happy if their candidate’s proposed tax increases on them end up being larger than anticipated, or if he actually meant some of the anti-trade rhetoric he unleashed in the Democratic primary. It appears from his adjusted rhetoric over the course of the fall campaign that Obama himself would prefer to ease toward the center. But an enlarged, empowered and impatient Democratic congressional majority might feel differently.
That Democratic congressional majority may also be an integral part of the GOP path forward. It’s the nature of politicians of both parties to overreach and even while Obama and Rahm Emanuel seem inclined to chart a more centrist course, the pressure from Capitol Hill may be as difficult for him to resist as it was for Clinton and Carter during their first years in office. Republicans have a long road back, no question about it. But left to their own devices, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid could shorten that road considerably.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:00 am
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